Doing Development: Setting up VMware Server
This is the first part in what will be an ongoing set of articles on setting up and getting ready to do development. Before one begins to do any sort of development there needs to be somewhere to do it. With the advent of modern computers and the amazing amount of horsepower that they now contain virtualization makes a great way to set up a perfect, portable environment that gives a developer an incredible amount of control over their work environment.
There are many different virtualization options available now that processors support virtualization directly on the hardware and the aforementioned abundance of computing power. Linux and Windows users can choose from qemu, KVM, VirtualBox, VMware Player/Workstation/Server, Parallels and Xen (Windows misses out on KVM and Xen).
Out of that list, VMware has been in the virtualization business for a long time and as a result have wonderfully robust codebases for virtualization. It is because of this I will be setting up VMware Server, a free-as-in-beer product that allows a user to create virtual machines. The added benefit is that the end user can easily move this VM from machine to machine and even between VMware products.
Install Debian Etch on an older G3 iMac
One thing that stops many people from trying Linux is that either they don’t want to go through the hassle of dual-booting their machine and possibly loosing everything in the process, or that the ease of use with virtualization technology such as VMware and VirtualBox make non-commitment to an OS trivial. If one is serious about using an alternative OS, I think it’s better to use it on a machine all by itself.
What better way to do that than to get a cheap computer, in this case an old iMac, and load Linux on it. While the process isn’t exactly the same as doing this on an x86 PC, once the OS is loaded one gets a feel for how everything works. You’ll also get the advantage of a real, multitasking OS instead of MacOS 9 or earlier.
Howto: Install IPCop 1.4.15 Firewall (Part 3 - Securing Your Network)
Now that IPCop is installed and you can access it from anywhere in the world via OpenVPN, now comes securing your network and making sure that the bad guys stay out while making sure that what goes on in your network is logged.
Read on for more.
Java Tutorials from Sun
In my quest to find a new language to learn (leaning toward Python, but figured I should give Java a shot *shudder*), I came across some pretty nice tutorials from Sun on learning Java.
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/index.html
Howto: Install IPCop 1.4.15 Firewall (Part 2 - OpenVPN)
In Part 1 of this tutorial, we walked through setting up a basic IPCop server that would work for most people. For people that want constant access to their files or want to take advantage of being secure no matter where they are, there is an IPCop module called Zerina that set ups OpenVPN on IPCop. Read below to find out how to set this up on IPCop. Read more